Category Tactics
Demonstration to Stop the Rockaway Pipeline
Because of Hurricane Sandy and rising seas
Because the pipeline is their choice to continue with the disaster
Because we have taken so much already
Because it’s our beach
Because it’s our future
The Ugly American Goes to Chiapas: Correcting Hedges on the Zapatistas
A lie not only deceives others, turning them into objects to be manipulated and used, but a lie erodes trust, the cement that holds communities and relationships together. Lies lead to cynicism. This cynicism spreads outward like a disease until it blights the landscape. – Chris Hedges, “Decalogue VIII: Theft”, Losing Moses on the Freeway […]
Diversity of Tactics in the Civil Rights Movement 1963-1964
As the mainstream media presents its sanitized retrospective of the movement in this era of civil rights anniversaries, join Lorenzo Raymond for a reclamation of People’s history and a salute to the mass militancy that changed America.
How Nonviolent Was the Civil Rights Movement? (21 Quotations)
Above: Birmingham police injured by rocks thrown by protesters, May 7, 1963 (AP Photo) “My dream has become a nightmare,” Martin Luther King said in 1967, as a government he’d hoped could end racism and poverty instead escalated towards genocide in Vietnam. Protesters in America would need to flirt with guerilla warfare before that particular nightmare […]
Be Like the Wolf
“Franny is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like to be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid, you can’t be one wolf, you’re always eight or nine, six or seven.” -Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980) 1. After an absence of 70 years, the wolf is back. […]
Sunday: Political Propaganda Workshop with Cindy Milstein
Please join us for a day of creating and distributing non-digital agitation/propaganda.
If He Can’t Lie, It’s Not His Revolution: Chris Hedges vs. Emma Goldman
by L. Raymond Most people I know who actively work for social justice make an effort to ignore Chris Hedges. When he puked up a nasty little screed demonizing militancy in the Occupy movement last year, Hedges – in the words of Occupy Wall Street organizer Amin Husain – “almost derailed us” [1] (Sadly, Amin was wrong about the “almost” part). […]
Fragments from a Lost Critique (for Occupy Wall Street)
1. A Temperature Check The condition of experiencing warmth amongst an assemblage of people. Likewise, the feeling of coldness from a group of enemies. In the absence of standards and values, a means of measurement—informal, spontaneous—for the participants. In the absence of scale, in the absence of reference points, in the absence of history, an […]
Liberal Paranoia and the Vandalism of History
Recently, an article by Todd Gitlin – Columbia University professor and ex-60’s radical – was circulated around the web entitled “The Wonderful World of Informers and Agent Provocateurs.” 1 Using the current NSA scandal as a hook, the piece described itself as an “attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story […]
Saturday: Diversity of Tactics in the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1965: A Case Study
Popular history characterizes the civil rights struggle as part of what historian Andrew Hartman calls the “good sixties” – a period when social movements were supposedly pacifistic and innately liberal – but the scholarly consensus is coming to agree that the Black freedom movement did not win its greatest victories until it resorted to radical and diverse tactics.
Pacifism and the Coma of Occupy
Watching the heart wrenching scenes of resistance, repression, and mass rebellion in both Turkey and Brazil this month is a bittersweet, and in some ways shameful, experience. For an American, it can only bring to mind the Occupy moment of two years ago – the moment that was torn away from us, and that we failed to muster any similar courage to defend.
An Open Discussion on the History and Future of Radical Student Struggle
Saturday May 18th at 3:15 PM as part of the Free University in front of Cooper Union at E 7th St and 3rd Ave: Join an open discussion with Cooper Union students and veterans of the 2008-2010 student occupations at the University of California and The New School about the recent history of, and possible […]
Strike is a Verb! From taking over space to taking over time
Occupy Wall Street as seen by AFFECT. The following questions were posed by e-mail by Ana Bigotte Vieira and Miguel Castro Caldas between November 2012 and January 2013.
On Picket Lines and Boredom
[A text we received at the beginning of the strike, in response to our “Strike Lessons:”] When the company pays us to drive in circles, they call it work. When the union pays us to walk in circles, they call it not-work. But either way, we always seem to end up back where we started. […]
Updates on the Strike
The school bus drivers strike by Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181 continues, now in its 18th day, with less than a third of its routes running last week, and attendance of special needs students down 20%. Of those eighteen days, sixteen have featured temperatures below freezing, with picketers ostensibly still called to be present for […]
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